An Adventure in Trust
by S.R. Winchester
Summary: The Master gets pregnant after an encounter with the Doctor. But while rattling through time and space, the only one to pick up the pieces is the Master's companion, Mara. MPreg, MasterOC, mentioned DoctorMaster
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One

The soft choking, whickering sound from the doorway suddenly grounded the Master's wandering mind, and he snarled over his shoulder, "Shut up and close the door! I know what you're thinking." His face faded to a sickly shade of green as he turned back to his TARDIS' toilet and retched again into the basin.

"Why yes, I do think it will rain in Cardiff on the 25th of June in 2613." His companion – one Mara Jade Harkness – leaned on the door frame to the bathroom, her arms crossed and waist-length brown hair braided tightly into a crown around her head. It was frayed slightly where she'd slept in it. Her pretty face was blank, but her gray eyes were concerned. She straightened up, her garnet skirt rippling as she descended to her knees beside him. "It's been nearly a week now. Are you sure you don't want me to check you over?" Her long, slim hand rested on the curve of his shoulder blade as she gently stroked his hair.

He wanted to snap at her. He wanted to throw her against the porcelain of the deep, claw-footed bathtub. He wanted to twist her spindly wrist until it snapped. Instead, he went on instinct and leaned into Mara's touch and sighed heavily. "Fine," he said with a grudging sigh and looked up with a pale face and tired eyes. The bags underneath were dark purple like bruises.

Mara leaned over and kissed his forehead. The whisper of a vague rose scent soothed the anger in his stomach, and his face relaxed very slightly. The soft clicking of her heeled sandals faded into the halls of the TARDIS, and the Master spit away the remains of bile in his throat and flushed the toilet to follow her.

The Master paused and watched her from the doorway to the small medical room his TARDIS had prepared on Mara's request (the old machine had a fondness for the girl). She looked like the perfect blend of Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones, her parents. The 25-year-old possessed willowy yet sleek curves that flaunted her clothes in a way a model would have envied; much like her papa's build without the heavy muscle. As she walked around the small padded table, checking the cabinets for supplies, her heels clicked on the smooth gray linoleum. In the entirety of the time she had been his companion, he had never seen her wear anything but casual skirts and heels, even when running for her life.

Mara turned to him, flashing the lacings that held the front and back panel of her black blouse together. One of her long hands reached for him, the other clamping a clipboard to her chest. She knew him well enough to know he wouldn't take her hand. His pride demanded he do everything under his own power, yet he had let her comfort him while he was weak on the floor of the bathtub. She hadn't been exaggerating; the Master had been ill for nearly a week straight, and it was damn-well time someone took care of him.

Unfortunately, that job – like many others – fell to Mara herself.

The Master, snarling and spitting like an angry cat, crawled up onto the padded platform and lay back, watching the daughter of Torchwood. The motion, however, turned his stomach, and he clenched his jaw to try not to vomit again. Mara's hand rested in a comforting gesture on a warm cheek as she spoke a few Gallifreyan words that rolled liquidly off her tongue.

"_It's all right,_" she said, words she had repeated many times before. The TARDIS has taught her the words in the Master's natural language as a way to extend a metaphoric olive branch.

The Master's jaw unclenched, and he lay quietly on the table while Mara, smoothing a loose stand of brown from her face, set to work removing his AC/DC T-shirt and unbuttoning his jeans to pull down slightly. His face twitched as an uncharacteristic wave of self-consciousness crashed down into his mind, which made no sense since he and his companion had run into each other in some form of undress more times than worth mentioning.

Her hand ghosted down over his cheek again, and she repeated the Gallifreyan words in a voice that wouldn't have carried to anyone but him. Mara removed the plastic cover of a hypodermic needle and gave the inside of one of the Master's elbows a gentle thwack with two chilly fingers. The vein bulged slightly, and again the Master had to swallow the urge to snap her wrist. As it was, he bit his tongue as she pierced the vein and drew a quantity of blood into the chamber. He hissed and seethed but let her tape a bandage onto the wound.

"Master," Mara said quietly, "it's been nearly six weeks since we've been to Cardiff, hasn't it?" She recapped the needle and inserted it into a tray the TARDIS offered her before returning her attention to the Master.

His hand flashed out and wrapped around her thin wrist, the thumb easily overlapping a few of his fingers. He tugged her over to the table and almost pulled her on top of him. As it was, she threw her free arm out and wedged it on the opposite side of his ribs, so she leaned over him on the table. Grabbing her neck, he dragged her down to within three inches of his face.

"Never," he snarled venomously, "mention that day again!"

Unlike those who would cower, Mara lifted the arm still clutched in his hand and laid her fingers to his cheek. Jack's slate-gray eyes peered down into his own. "You had sex with the Doctor, didn't you?" she whispered and covered the hand at her neck with her own.

The TARDIS went silent but for the soft ticking of the Time Rotor in the Console Room down the long hall. The Master's eyes filled slowly with shame, and he sat up to rest his forehead in the curve of his companion's shoulder. He rasped two words in Gallifreyan that took the TARDIS a few moments to translate, surprised as it was to hear them.

"Hold me."

It wasn't the first time he had asked her that, but the other times had been in English. Whenever the drums in his head got to be too much, he would spend the night curled up like a child beside her. Come morning, he was back to what passed as normal and pretended that the weakness had never happened. The present situation had nothing to do with the drums.

Mara enfolded him into a warm hug and whispered her mantra "_It's all right_" to him as he held on. There were no sobs, no shaking of his shoulders, no choked breathing. He just wrapped his arms around her waist and sat there, listening to the single heartbeat in Mara's veins and the drums in his own head. Then the Master realized something.

The drums were quieter.

His hazel eyes widened. The drums never quieted. Never. As Mara started to lean away, his hands jumped up to cup her head, placing her forehead to his. The beats throbbed softly. One, two, three, four. His grip moving to her shoulders, he pushed her back about six inches. The same volume, the same low tap of the drums. He pushed her back again, this time to arm's length. Still the same. The Master frowned, puzzled, and released his companion, who had borne the experimental locomotion without complaint.

The TARDIS beeped in Mara's direction as she slid off the table and carefully laid the Time Lord back on the table. His reverie snapped, and he whipped his head toward the exam terminal. "You're going senile, you old crate! I'm not pregnant!"

Snorting, Mara shook her head and abandoned him in favor of the faithful machine. "Show me what you've got, old girl."

A screen materialized in the wall and began streaming Gallifreyan letters and figures before switching to English. Mara glanced over her shoulder at the brooding Master before brushing at her brown bangs and settling a pair of black-rimmed glasses on her nose. The streaming figures slowed enough for the girl to read them. Her brow creased in thought, then deepened in confusion. The TARDIS had a good basis for claiming the Time Lord was pregnant; several hormone levels were out of whack, some too high and others too low. The pattern was similar– though not identical – to that of a pregnant human woman.

"Two more tests, would you say?" she murmured to the TARDIS as she watched the figures solidify into a graph on the screen. "For now, that's about all I can do."

The TARDIS beeped an affirmative, followed by a series of rapid whistles, warbles, and bleeps of suggestion.

"How do you know so much about human medical tests?"

Bleep.

"Stupid question, sorry." Mara flicked a glance over his shoulder at the Master and said softly, "I hope you're wrong, old girl. I don't think it would be good for him."

A small plastic cup appeared beside Mara's arm, and she laughed at the implication. "You tell him," she said. "He's already threatened me today. It's your turn, honey."

The TARDIS bleeped indignantly.

"Your mother was a coral, so don't you go there." Laughing, Mara handed the Master the cup while the TARDIS bleeped and whistled to the Time Lord.

The Master snarled at the two. "I am _not_ going to piss in a cup!"

"You don't want to think you're pregnant, and you won't piss in a cup to disprove it. Temperamental are the Time Lords." This last was said to the TARDIS as the Master snatched the cup and turned his back.

The screen on which she's seen the graph of the blood analysis flashed again, a question appearing as the TARDIS addressed her: _"The tests aren't needed, Mara."_

"I know, but the more concrete the proof, the less likely he is to try and deny it. How long have you known, anyway?"

_"5 days by the Earth calendar."_

"And you're just now saying something?"

_"I thought you'd have caught on by now."_

Mara sighed heavily. "Yes, I'm human. I'm very aware of it." At a tap on her shoulder, she held out her hand, palm up. The Master set the cup down and, standing so close behind him she could feel his body's lower temperature, zipped his fly.

"Not the first jeans zipper I've heard, Master," she said blithely. The overtly-sexual nature of the movement was not lost on her. After all, she'd inherited her papa's radar for all things innuendo.

The Master lifted his arms as Mara measured some of the urine into a test tube and inserted it into the exam terminal as well, his hands resting on the lip of the table at which she was working. He was pressed up against her, close enough to pin her but with enough space to let her turn around. He reached up and untied the black scarf from her hair, letting it fall away. There were a few things about Mara that suited him; one was the way her long hair slid through his fingers like silk strands or rippled when she moved. When she turned to face him – as she always did – he drew her into his arms and held her head so she could hear the double-time beating of his hearts.

"I'm not pregnant," he said in her ear, and only she would have noticed the hint of warning in his tone. He didn't want to be, and definitely not with the Doctor's child. His stubble scratched at her cheek as he dipped his head to draw her closer. The Time Agent's daughter had seen him in every imaginable mood, and she was probably the only living being he trusted besides his faithful TARDIS.

For a moment, she almost believed him, so sincere was his tone, but then she remembered the past five days of waking up to a concerned TARDIS and a vomiting Master, and she couldn't believe him. Leaving one arm around his waist, she placed the other hand on his stomach. "Master," she whispered, "the TARDIS can sense it. You are, and running these tests is only to make you see it. I'm sorry, but you _are_ having the Doctor's baby."

Note: Thanks to my great friend and beta reader, The Glorious Cheshire Cat. I call her Kera. She gave me a lot help with this story besides editing it. She helped me with ideas, directions, and helped me plot out what would happen. I owe her a lot. So, Kera, the next time you can to go flying off through and need someone to be your co-pilot, you know where to find me! You're brilliant, and I owe you!

-Sybil Renee Winchester


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Mara hadn't fallen asleep yet; the Master knew the pattern of her breathing after four Earth years of traveling with her (for Mara's benefit, the TARDIS had started running on "Earth time"). Nightmares, the drums in his head, all sorts of various sleep disruptions had taken them into each others' beds at one point or another, so he'd learned the deep cadence of her sleeping breaths versus the even pulse of mere relaxation. The Master propped himself on his elbow on her bed and ran his hand down over the wisps of brown hair that curled out across her bare shoulder.

God, those four years had blown by, and no, that wasn't a joke on being a Time Lord. Mara had never risen to the Master's bait, never reacted extremely to anything he said or did. At the beginning of their relationship, he wouldn't have let her see him such a pitiable state as sick and pale on the bathroom floor. He let a faint smile twist his lips at the memory of his meeting with Mara in 2421.

_The wind off Cardiff Bay was chilly in the early October. The Master muttered something obscene in Gallifreyan and pulled the TARDIS door shut with a sharp snap behind him. He hated the bloody cold. With a lot of the buildings after the Millennium Centre demolished in the intervening years, the Roald Dahl Plass stretched out into flat grey docks that dropped abruptly into the cold waters of Cardiff Bay. He wrinkled his nose in distaste; without those buildings to break up the breeze of the bay, it stank of fish. It looked white, flat. Barren._

_"Weevil!"_

_On reflex, the Master stepped back against the TARDIS, which had taken on the appearance of modern phonebox with an Out of Order sign pasted to the glass, as a brown-haired missile hurdled past him with a Sig Sauer in her hand. She pelted down the length of the Plass, leapt down a trio of stairs that led to the extended docks, and kept on running. Damn, not even the Doctor could move that fast. Probably three seconds behind her came a tall man with a similar gun in hand, wearing World War 2 period dress and yelling into the earpiece an inch from his lips._

_"Get around it, Ianto! Mara's got it on the docks! Keep it from getting back to the city!"_

_Ah, now he knew where he'd seen that face before. It was the Doctor's friend, Captain Jack. The Master laughed as Jack's long legs ate up more pavement in an attempt to catch up with the girl who was now little more than a speck on the horizon, chasing another speck that seemed to be limping a little._

_Well, why not?_

_The Master followed Jack at a leisurely walk, watching as the three outer dots converged on the limping one. The air cracked with distant gunfire, and the dot the Master presumed to be a Weevil dropped. The Plass went quiet for a few moments, then echoed with a splash as the body was tossed into the bay. The Master smirked; Jack had a new pest disposal policy then._

_It took a few minutes, but Jack, his lover Ianto, and the brunette with the Sig walked back from the docks in a little knot, shoulders hunched against the wind. The brunette kept having to imitate Marilyn Monroe to combat the wind picking at her knee-length blue skirt. A sleek leather bolero jacket kept the chill wind off her arms, but her knees and calves were bare until the brown pumps encased her feet._

_"What have I told you about running after a Weevil in heels?" Jack was saying as they came into hearing range. "Mara, you could break an ankle or fall into the bay. That would kill you before the Weevil could get to you." He reached out and snatched the girl closer, pulling her up under his great coat._

_"I get it from you," Mara said and wrapped her slender arms around Jack's waist. "And I do mean putting duty before myself, not the heels."_

_Ianto laughed and also put an arm around her, leaning closer to Jack to kiss the girl's temple. "I'll make coffee when we get back to the Hub and get you both warmed up."_

_Jack lifted Ianto's chin to kiss him deeply over Mara's head, and the girl wriggled out and away from them. "If you two are going to play 'Naked Hide and Seek' in the Hub again, call me when you're done. I'm scarred enough for one lifetime." She embraced Ianto and tucked her Sig into a holster around her slim hips._

_As the two men disappeared into the Torchwood Hub, Mara shook her head and stood staring at the thin rim of ice around the water tower, letting wind and chill numb her legs. As the Master silently approached her, she reached up to brush away the strands of brown that rippled like a liquid shadow. The bolero's sleeve pulled back to reveal a splint on her wrist. Her gun arm._

_"Where is everyone?" asked the Master when he was close enough, hunching his shoulders against the fishy breeze. _

_"If they're smart," answered the girl, flashing him a glance with slate-gray eyes tinted blue with cybernetic contact lenses, "they're inside near the heaters or under blankets. It's pitifully cold out here." She crossed her arms and shivered under her bolero. "Where I should be, but my dads... Well, I know when to excuse myself after twenty-one years."_

_"Got a name to go with that angel face?" the Master purred, lifting her chin with his forefinger. She was pretty, he didn't try to deny it, but he could see where Jack's features blended with Ianto's. Without the cybernetic contacts, she probably would look more like Jack than she did now._

_She made a vaguely-familiar gesture of smirking out the side of her mouth, probably something she inherited. "Mara Jade," she said simply. "What do they call you then? I haven't seen you around before, and I'm rarely out of the Plass."_

_The Master fell back on an alias as he, unconsciously, stepped closer to her. "Harold Saxon," he said._

_Mara surprised him by barking a laugh and grabbing his wrist. "Your lips are turning blue, mate. Come on up to the house, and I'll make you some tea." For a girl of twenty-one, she was admittedly quite candid. But then again, he'd seen her with the Sig Sauer. Even if she was a terrible shot, the 40-caliber rounds would cause some serious damage. The Master swallowed a smile as he followed the little sprite across the Plass._

_The tea was heavenly, though Mara insisted that it was the bottom of the tea tin. Some of Ianto's culinary skills showed their hand as Mara expertly warmed a plate of scones and placed them on the table in the mid-sized kitchen. The table had been expertly sandwiched between the black oven and the island that contained the dishwasher. One of the burners still glowed from the brunette boiling the kettle. Hanging over the stove was a photo of Jack with his arm around Ianto and a toddler cradled between them._

_"Papa took me and Dad to London that day," Mara volunteered when she saw where the Master was looking. She had tied a black scarf around her head as he took in the kitchen and the white-washed chairs and cabinets. "Papa said I slept all the way up and back."_

_"Harkness and Jones are your parents," the Master said by way of understanding her. "Who carried you?"_

_"Jack," she answered. "He swears I took out a lifetime of aggression on him in eight months. I was born two weeks early. So," she said as she took her seat, "what's your real name?"_

_The Master half-choked on his tea as he realized the implications of her question. She hadn't been fooled for a moment. Of course; she worked for Torchwood, and she would have grown up on stories about Jack's past exploits. These would probably include the election of Harold Saxon as Prime Minister and then his death at the hands of his wife Lucy. The brunette had brains as well as her angel face._

_She was still watching him, waiting. Somehow, he felt compelled to answer her. As if his lips were on a separate circuit and didn't hear his brain's command to stay silent, he set down his tea cup and met Mara's frank gaze. "You know," he said, "about the Time Lords and that there are only two left. The Doctor and the Master."_

_Mara blinked once. "Yes, of course."_

_His mouth twisted into a smirk. "I_ am_ the Master."_

A quiet moan from Mara brought the Master back to the present with a bump, and he looked down to see her face drawn and her knuckles white on the blanket. Automatically, he pried them free and gave them a squeeze.

Nightmares. They both had them after everything they'd been through. If her usual pattern applied, it would be the one where her father Ianto was killed by a Nostrovite. At the touch of his hand, her face relaxed. Good; it wouldn't do to have two disturbed people in the TARDIS. Before long, his companion sank back into a deep sleep.

At least one of them _could_ sleep.

The Master let his hand trail up her arm and neck to rest on her cheek. She didn't react. Good; she was well and truly asleep. She couldn't hold what he was about to do against him. He rose from the bed to remove his black suit pants and white shirt, stripping himself to his skivvies, then discarding those too. As he went to pull on his sweats, his hand ghosted over his lower stomach where a baby would be growing. _If_ he was pregnant. Scoffing, he threw his clothes on and slid back into bed.

It was ridiculous, of course. While male Time Lords could change their physiology to carry a child, it involved a conscious effort which he hadn't made. He was sick; it was possible. The Master leaned his cheek on the top of Mara's head and dragged her into his arms, her warm back pressed to his chest. She whined at the movement and nestled down between him and the warmth of the bed.

The Master scoffed at the idea of love at first sight, but he couldn't deny that meeting Mara had provided a spark of interest he'd been lacking. Time Lords were meant to be solo travelers, but companions weren't unheard of. He remembered the encounter with a pair of Faerans that had convinced him to take her on as his companion just as he was drifting off to sleep.

_The raw, pasty grey skin of the male Faeran was blotched with the darker grey and black that indicated it had recently fed; this the Master could see through the dirty window. Unfortunately, that left a trail of bodies and injury in its wake. Several people in Cardiff had been hospitalized with cookie-cutter bite marks which turned necrotic within hours, and even more had been found dead in alleys, the bay, the middle of the roads. The Master, Mara, Ianto, and Jack had barred themselves into the library of a long-abandoned house outside the city where they'd drawn the Faerans to spare the population. Mara – the Master at her heels – ran up the spiral stairs in one corner to the balcony of the room, flying down the shelves as Jack and Ianto locked the windows, doors, and any other opening that the humanoid Faerans could use as an entrance._

_"The Dewey Decimal System," Mara panted, skidding to a stop suddenly and squirreling up a ladder. "Never thought those years working in the Central Library would save my life." She snatched a black tome perhaps two inches wide from the shelf and slid back down the ladder's balustrade._

_The Master caught her on reflex, pivoted slightly on the balls of his feet to set her down. He noted, almost absently, that she was wearing black heels. Again. "What are you on to now?" he asked as she flipped through the book without stepping away from him, despite having released her._

_"The Faeran are like the Harvoken," Mara said so quickly, it didn't sound like English. "Occult defenses are the __only__ defenses." She slammed the book shut in her hands and, grabbing his hand, sprinted to the top of the stairs. "Iron!" she shouted. "Steel, anything with iron in it! It's toxic to Faerans."_

_Jack wrenched open a roll-top desk, the knob coming out of the decaying wood in his hand and spilling sawdust and a few termites onto the cracked felt surface. He and Ianto rifled through the yellowed papers and envelopes while the other two investigated the drawers and alcoves on their level. The Master worked frantically beside the brunette; while he was only on his 6__th__ regeneration, a bite from a Faeran would kill him as easily as any human. Then, if he regenerated nearby, he'd be bitten and/or eaten again, and so the cycle would go until finally, he would be dead for good._

_At this sobering thought, his fingers touched something metallic and cold. A letter opener. He grabbed it just as the door fifteen feet away from him exploded inward in a spray of splintered wood and sawdust (and perhaps a few more termites). A trio of Faerans – two partially-fed males and one unfed female – distorted their skeletons to fit through the hole, their shark-like teeth champing. The Master pushed Mara up the ladder behind him, out of the aliens' reach, and fisted the letter opener until his knuckles went white._

_"MARA!" shouted Ianto from the floor below as more doors buckled and vanished into clouds of dust and debris. Time was out. Ianto barely had a chance to see his daughter climbing higher on the ladder to an empty recess what would have held more books had it been finished before a red-and-pink mottled female obscured his view. He planted a bullet between her eyes, forcing her back enough for him to grab a box knife from Jack and slam the point into her throat. It smoked, the flesh bubbling, as the Faeran shrieked with pain, tried to bite him... and dissolved around the wound until she was nothing but a greasy pink stain on the old carpet._

_Putting his back to the ladder to give the girl a chance to think, the Master stabbed at the trio surrounding him. One of the males went down after getting the sharp point to the right side of the neck, but the other snapped at the Master's hand, making him recoil before the female could also die. The female's teeth sank into his arm but didn't make contact with his skin owing to the layers of loose cloth. The Master jabbed her in the eye to make her let go and then in the neck. The shriek nearly deafened him, breaking his concentration just long enough for the last male to lunge at him..._

_The male's head exploded into frothing blood and wisps of white and pink smoke. The Master looked up to see Mara, still seated in the recess six feet over his head, with a nail gun in her hands, her feet on the top wrung of the ladder. She smiled down at him. "Nail gun," she said amusedly and tossed something silver and tubular down to him. "Sorry, thought you'd want that."_

_It was the sonic screwdriver he'd picked up on his last trip. The little pick-pocket! A laser screwdriver was all well and good, but there were some things that required a sonic._

_The Master laughed as the girl – with her battery-powered nail gun – descended to the floor, catching her when she was four steps up and swinging her down. "You do think fast on your feet, don't you?" he said as they leaned over the balustrade to check on Jack and Ianto._

_Mara chuckled as she took aim with the nail gun. "Blame my parents," she told him. "Papa! Dad! Duck!"_

_The two men dropped to the floor as – with a rapid _pbbft-hiss, pbbft-hiss_ – the Faerans began to explode one by one. When the shriek of the final one died away, Mara set down the gun and sprinted down the spiral stairs through the sticky goop that had been about seven Faerans a few moments before. She threw her arms around a sweaty and very dirty Jack, kissing his cheek as he hugged her so tightly, she gasped._

_Upon being transferred to her father, she shuddered and murmured, "I was afraid I was going to lose you." The choke in her voice unnerved the Master, who had followed her down. After all he'd seen her do, the catch in her voice belonged to a lesser woman._

_He waited silently as the family assured each other that they were perfectly fine, until Jack turned to him with an arm around both his husband and daughter. His eyes were hard, almost angry, before he forced out two words that made the Time Lord blink._

_"Thank you."_

_Mara gasped quietly and removed herself from her parents, walking back over to the Master. "Are you all right? They didn't hurt you?" she asked, taking his hands to examine his fingers and arms._

_He'd meant to say that he was fine and to stop fussing over him. He'd meant to tell her to back off. Hell, he'd meant to make some kinda of snide remark about being superior to a human. Instead, he lifted her chin with his hand and said, "I'm fine."_

_The relief in her face flooded through him like a gulp of warm tea. "Oh good," she sighed, moving her free hand to her chest. "I'd feel awful if I'd gotten you hurt."_

_Something clicked then, and the three men understood what it meant. Jack's face grew pale, and Ianto unconsciously grasped at his free hand to still his own from shaking._

_The Master took a step back from Mara and offered her his hand. "What would you say," he said slowly, "to coming with me?"_

_Big gray eyes darted from him to her parents and back again. Her lower lip trembled. "I..." She looked back at Jack and Ianto, and she suddenly seemed like a very young child. "C-Can I?" she asked. It was a question both to her colleagues and her parents. The Master pitied her for the uncertainty in her face._

_Jack and Ianto looked at each other, a silent conversation. Then, Ianto said, "It's your choice. We'll still be here."_

_Mara's gaze went back to the Master, and the uncertainty melted into resolve. "I'd love to come with you."_

The Master smiled in the darkness of the room and, his arm tucked comfortably under Mara's head, drifted into sleep. The TARDIS beeped and whistled and settled itself down into low-power, "hibernation" mode as it bumped around through time and space, unknowing of the storm to come.

Note: Well, this is your token "flashback" chapter. Also, for more about Jack's pregnancy with Mara and other snapshots of the Torchwood family as of 2400 AD, I'll have a collection of qwik-fics called "Snapshots". It won't be chronological, but there will be multiple scenes to go along with _An Adventure in Trust_. Also, if you have a better title, **please** tell me!

Oh, and if you haven't caught on, I use "papa" for the father that carried and gave birth to the child, and "father" or "dad" for the other parent. Sorry everything's in italics, but it _is_ mostly flashbacks.

For more on the Harvoken, please read/listen to "Forever Autumn" by Mark Morris, a Doctor Who novel starring the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones.

-Sybil Renee Winchester


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Sam Tyler rubbed his eyes, the beginnings of a migraine throbbing in his head. Why did he have to baby-sit this "psychologist" coming up from Cambridge? It was bad enough that he'd worked more overtime in this week alone than in his entire working career; now he had to wait on some over-educated prat and brief him on this serial murderer that had been stalking Manchester. Taking a long drag of his lukewarm coffee, he glanced around the dark pub. It was nearly deserted at this time of afternoon, but patrons would flood in when their work days ended. Andrew's Pub was a haven near the police station, a place that refused to offer alcohol to cops while on duty; come end of shift, however, the booze flowed, and more than a few patrons would sport hangovers in the morning.

Still, if he thought about it, it was better than life in 2006. Less red tape, more reward for his work. More paperwork, not that it bothered him; there were pros to out-weigh the cons. His relationship with Annie Cartwright, for example. He was planning to ask her on a date next week when he saw her next. He'd have asked tonight if Gene Hunt hadn't dumped the job of picking up and briefing the Cambridge psychologist.

"DI Sam Tyler?"

Sam blinked and looked up. The speaker proved to be a rather young girl with large blue-gray eyes and dark brown hair. She wore a gray, high-waisted skirt with a white blouse and simple black pumps. She also stood beside a black suitcase. She tipped her head at him, adjusted the black beret on her head.

"I'm Rhian Jones," said the girl. "I'm from the University of Cambridge. I was sent down about the recent serial killings." She held out a hand that was small and incredibly feminine as far as hands went. She couldn't have been more than twenty-five at the oldest, and Sam was supposed to believe she was a credible source? Bah, not even if she'd been in his original time.

He shook her hand and gestured for her to have a seat. "All right, Rhian. Want anything before we get into the details?" He didn't expect this slip of a girl to require anything more than a bagel and a cup of tea, given the fact that she had just gotten off the train from Cambridge, and they served meals on extended trips.

Rhian looked up at the hovering waitress and said, "Lemonade and a scone, please. I never eat much." She slid gently into the seat and rolled her suitcase in under the table. She flashed a smile that made Sam's heart make a strange flipping sensation. "Now, DCI Hunt didn't tell me anything about the case, and I don't read the paper. What's this whole mess about?"

He exhaled tiredly and rubbed his temple with two fingers. "Well, about six months back, people started turning up dead. It started with a university senior, found in her bedroom. At first we suspected the boyfriend she'd dumped just a day or two before, but his alibi checked out. He was out drinking with his roommate at the estimated time of death. Roommate's on medication and can't drink. So we chalked it up to a random killing, until the other victims started turning up.

"The death toll's up to six now, and the most recent was last night at roughly eleven. We still have her in the morgue if you want to see her. Name's Julienne Williams, age twenty-four." He paused as the waitress delivered Rhian's scone and refilled his tea. The name badge read "Eleanor", and her mud-brown eyes scanned Sam appreciatively before she sashayed away to the kitchen again.

The psychologist sipped her lemonade "Well, what makes you think the murders are connected?"

She wasn't an idiot; she knew he'd been holding information back to test her. He drained his coffee cup and steeled himself for her reaction. "The bodies were all posed the same way. They were stabbed seven times in the chest, cutting into the heart and aorta so they bled out quickly and left a bloody mess behind." His body vibrated with an involuntary shiver as he thought of the massacred girls.

"Pharisee Complex," Rhian said simply. "The killer has a psychological need to punish those he believes have challenged him. He may be a man – or woman – of high standing in society or something. Is there any link between the victims?"

Sam nodded his head slowly, realization dawning. "Age, race, and general description."

"Congratulations, DI Tyler," she said with mock cheer. "You have a serial killer. The wankers are hard to track." She stretched, hooking her hands behind her neck and looking up at the ceiling fan that spun lazily above her. "Serial killers have no connection with their victims usually. Just a type that they prefer, usually by physical appearance or age range or something like that. The bad news is that until a pattern is established, most of the victims' cases are never linked and rarely closed. Good news is, you know the pattern now. That gives you an advantage. What's his type?"

He raised an eyebrow at her flippant remark, again wondering if this girl really was the expert she was reported to be. She was far younger than he thought a psychologist should have been, especially in this era when women rarely made a high-level position like that. Even if she had been in his own time, he would have been skeptical. Criminal profiling was in its infancy in 1973, and it was hardly an exact science; however, Rhian seemed to be ahead of her time. He retrieved a file from the backpack he had brought to brief her on the case.

He lay the file on the table in front of her and flipped it open. "Julienne Williams, Jane Levi, Elizabeth Smith, and Tara Hudson."

For the first time, she seemed to bear the weight of her twenty-something years as she lowered her blue-gray eyes to the type-written pages. Rhian went dead silent as she read, seriousness creeping into her face like a dark shadow. She closed the folder with finality and raised those steel-blue eyes to Sam. "Serial killer," she said flatly. "Victim type, execution, behavioral pattern. The M.O. is different in each case in detail but the same in basics. He has a desire to shock, so he carves up his victims like pumpkins on Halloween and poses them... The question will be, is he really insane?"

"Insane?"

She nodded. "With brutality like this, he'll enter an insanity plea. Despite how it sounds, the legal definition is that he wasn't able to tell right from wrong during the times the murders occurred." She offered a rye smile. "It's a misnomer, don't you think?" She drained her lemonade, finished her scone, and heaved a heavy sigh. "I also suspect there's a blasphemous side to the crime that you aren't going to tell me about in public."

Sam blinked. Damn, she was good. "How did you know?"

She looked at him wearily. "There usually is with a Pharisee Complex. Hence the name. The Pharisees were the body of people that condemned Christ to his crucifixion. They saw him as a threat to their station in the Jewish community and thought he wanted to undermine their power. So they had him arrested and crucified."

He looked uneasily over his shoulder at the diner full of civilians. "We can't discuss this here. We're trying to keep some information from the public."

Those slate-coloured eyes locked his for a moment. "It's a good practice. I hope someday it's standard procedure." The young woman slid out of her seat and rubbed a sore spot on her neck. The color had drained out of her face, and what remained seemed to have pooled in purple smudges under her eyes. A long drive combined with the task ahead of her – getting into the head of a killer who could torture and mutilate women – was starting to wear on her. Sam decided to get her to the hotel first and let her get herself together.

The detective grabbed her suitcase for her and handed Eleanor fifteen pounds, telling her to keep the change. She nodded at him. "Come back soon, DI Tyler," she said, looking sympathetically at Rhian. Eleanor lowered her voice, leaned in to whisper to him, "She looks like death warmed over. Get her some rest. Such a pretty little thing shouldn't be so weary. You keep an eye on her, so that monster on the loose doesn't get her."

Sam nodded a little, eying Eleanor critically. The woman was always trying to play matchmaker. Sometimes it worked, but usually it just embarrassed the participants. He wanted nothing more than to get the psychologist's opinion on the murder cases and get her home. He silently resented her presence. What could she tell them that they hadn't already figured out? That they were hunting a monster? Of course they were. But the orders had come from way over his head, and he had to follow them.

As he loaded her suitcase into the boot of his car, Rhian slumped in the passenger seat, buckling her seat belt. Heavy iron gray clouds hung above them, threatening rain. Omnious, Sam thought and slammed down the lid of the boot. Their serial killer had a thing for the storms of Manchester. He did his bloody work and let their rain wash him clean. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he would stalk the streets tonight.

He got into the cab with Rhian and started toward her hotel.

Note: FINALLY! Did you miss me?!

As the darling Late October pointed out, it's been over a year since I've updated. Over TWO years! I'm so sorry! It's been a rough year for me. _Really_ rough. But! I'm back now, baby!

Yeah, this chapter was meant to kinda make you go "WTF?" The bulk is a dream sequence. Ooh, the Master's dreams. Scary. I can't really call this chapter a crossover because it was just a dream and keep a clear conscious. So let me see... The Pharisee Complex is something of my own design and isn't an actual mental illness. Or if it is, I have no knowledge of it.

So! Next up: the horror of the serial killer, and the end of the Master's dream! If you want a new chapter, leave me a good review (not "update soon"; that guarantees I won't). I promise is won't take a year to update this time.

However, if you're looking for a replacement for the fabulous me, check out GallifreyanLovers on YouTube. Their "Gallifreyan Love Story" is amazing! Here's the link to the first one; just remove the spaces. www. youtube watch?v= vNwBahJjrLQ

See you soon!

-Sybil Renee Winchester


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